Writing a program to compute prime numbers efficiently is CS 101. You just need the computer horsepower to crunch the numbers and sit back and wait.

You would be correct if you hadn't included the word "efficiently" in your statement. The algorithm they teach you in CS 101 works just fine for numbers as big as this one. That is, it works just fine if you have billions of years to do the computations.

That's why this is getting attention. He used a different technique that's far more efficient (and complex) than just dividing every potential prime number candidate by every other number smaller than itself.

The network, called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) harnesses about 360,000 processors operating at 150 trillion calculations per second.

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